In several present discourses and practices that are involved in innovation and development projects, it seems like there is a strong emphasis on management and planning with agreements and clear goals as the crucial components. In this paper we propose another approach that more acknowledge the complexity and messiness of innovation. We will discuss how we, through Malmö Living Labs, have navigated across an ecology of ongoing projects and innovation policies that we try to merge into something coherent and meaningful in multiple ways.

Hobye, Mads, and Jonas Löwgren & Nicolas Padfield. 2013. “Designing social play through interpersonal touch: an annotated portfolio”. Paper presented at the Nordic Design Research Conference, Copenhagen/Malmö, June 9-12.

ABSTRACT – We present five design cases as an annotated portfolio, exploring ways to design for intimate, interpersonal touch and social intimacy in interaction design. Five key qualities are elicited from the cases, including novel connotations sparking curiosity; providing an excuse to interact; unfolding internal complexity; social ambiguity; norm-bending intimacy. The work highlights novel interaction design approaches fostering social play, turning participants into performers of their own narratives.

This Nordes 2013 paper by Anna Seravalli aims at contributing to the emerging field of design for social innovation by discussing the insights from the author’s long-term involvement as a design researcher in a social innovation project. In order to discuss this experience a particular perspective is introduced as an attempt of design to go beyond critique, and, specifically, of “composing together”. In this understanding, design for social innovation can be considered as a collective effort towards the construction and exploration of alternative ways of living and working.

Collaborative media entail an emerging set of digitally mediated practices, characterized by collaborative communicative action within organically developing, cross-medial infrastructures. We argue that computers are increasingly turning from tools into (collaborative) media in everyday use, and that this shift poses a significant challenge to the discipline of interaction design. Particularly prominent aspects of the challenge include the way design processes are conceptualized and structured, and the way in which communicative perspectives take precedence over instrumental ones.

Seravalli, Anna. 2013. Prototyping for opening production: from designing for to designing in the making together. Presented at Crafting the Future, 10th European Academy of Design Conference, April 17-19, 2013, Gothenburg, Sweden.

ABSTRACT – Open and collaborative processes are assuming a growing role in the generation of goods and services. There is an increasing number of examples where production processes are opened, relationships between producers and final users become blurred and where making together represents a central strategy in generating value.

Design is increasingly involved in supporting opening production, both in terms of developing technical infrastructures and in facilitating and nourishing processes of making together trying to understand how design can boost collaboration and openness in diverse fields.

EXCERPT – AffeXity [is a] project [that] opens implications for interaction design: designing affectively and designing for affect are two different things. […] At the heart of AffeXity is the convergence between performance and mobile technologies. In particular, the project uses the augmented reality browser Argon. This runs on smart phones and permits images, audio and video to be anchored in real world locations using geospatial coordinates or QR codes. The media float in the device’s display over the live feed from its camera. Appropriately for an augmented reality project, AffeXity is designed to have several layers, or modes, of interaction. In its simplest interactive mode, it is a locative media project with short movement improvisations videoed and geospatially tagged at various sites in Malmö, Sweden.

[PUBLICATION] In this HAID 2012 article we give an overview of our iterative work in developing visual editors for creating high resolution haptic patterns to be used in wearable, haptic feedback devices. By Cuartielles et al.

[PUBLICATION] This HAID 2012 paper investigates how artistic explorations can be useful for the development of mobile haptic technology. It presents an alternative framework of design for wearable haptics that contributes to the building of haptic communities outside specialized research contexts. By Cuartielles et al.

[PUBLICATION] The design challenge to “draw things together” was put forward by philosopher Bruno Latour in 2008. There are three related words in the challenge: drawing, things, and together. We find this challenge utterly relevant to contemporary design practice and design thinking, and have collectively for a decade reflected upon how to respond to such a challenge. This article summarizes it.

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